Gamification Is Exploitation
Gamification Is Exploitation
Gamification Is Exploitation
By Bill Peel
June 25, 2023
Summary
The trend of gamification might just be the apex of the neoliberal fantasy rendering work - and everything else - into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.
Gamification is a hollow scheme - offered up by managers, behavioral economists, industrial psychologists, and consultants, none of whom have our best interests in mind - that distracts us from the drudgery of work and endless self-improvement while constraining the human capacities it pretends to develop.
As the above example shows, gamification doesn't necessarily require internet technology to function, but the introduction of information technology has certainly helped gamification proliferate throughout workplaces.
These rating systems also give gig workers the sense of reward so crucial to the rhetoric of gamification.
Rather, "It's a style of consulting that happens to take up games as its solution." It puts the emphasis much more on the "-ification" suffix than it does the "Game." As a pair of business luminaries from the Wharton School write, gamification is all about giving an otherwise unenjoyable task an intrinsic motivation, a sense of fun that makes us want to do the task for its own sake.
In the case of voluntarily using a free app like Duolingo, gamification works to ensure that we want to keep giving it our attention, despite genuine criticisms that gamification undermines the app's stated goals of language acquisition.
Whether we're at work or in our brief moments of leisure time, gamification is always there to ensure that we never feel negatively about the task at hand.
Reference
Peel, B. (2023, June 25). Gamification is exploitation. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2023/06/gamification-exploitation-play-work